Planning packaging reorders for 4/20 and the holidays

Nobody gets surprised by 4/20. It's on the calendar every year, and so are the weeks around Thanksgiving and the end of December. Even so, packaging for a busy week is one of the easiest orders to place late. Usually the sales forecast was fine and the order just needed to go out earlier than it felt like it did.

Work back from the date

Begin with the day packing starts, since that's when the packaging has to be in the building. Then subtract the whole wait: production time at the factory plus shipping to you. Those are two separate numbers (see why we list production and shipping days separately), and shipping is the half that stretches when everyone orders at once. A part with a 3-week production time and a 5-week boat has to be ordered 8 weeks before packing starts, before any buffer.

Run that for 4/20. If packing starts in the first week of April, 8 weeks back is early February, and with a couple of weeks of buffer you're ordering in mid-January. That runs into Chinese New Year, which falls in late January or February, and many factories in China close for two to four weeks around it. If the closure lands inside your wait, add it on, which usually pulls the order back to late December or the first days of January.

Count before you order

Every reorder calculation starts from what you have. If the system says 12,000 bags and the shelf holds 8,000, you'll find out in the second week of April. Count what you'll lean on hardest a few weeks before your order date, and keep doing small counts through the run-up (more on that approach).

Reorder points, safety stock and the bump

A reorder point is the stock level where you order again: roughly your daily usage times the full wait, plus safety stock. Safety stock covers selling faster than expected while you wait and the shipment turning up late, and before a busy week both get more likely at once.

The extra demand is what a normal reorder point misses. Say you usually go through 400 pre-roll tubes a day and the two weeks before 4/20 run at double that. A reorder point built on 400 a day leaves you about 5,600 tubes short by 4/20 (400 extra a day for 14 days), less whatever safety stock you're carrying.

What ElloTree does, and where to step in

If you track inventory on ElloTree, the forecast learns a daily usage rate for each item at each location and works out a reorder point, a projected run-out date and a last safe order-by date. Lead time and shipping days are separate fields on the item, and once a couple of its purchase orders have been received in ElloTree, the forecast starts leaning on how long those orders actually took. Safety stock is sized from how much your usage and deliveries have varied, and any safety days you set are a floor it won't go below. For an item whose most recent order received in ElloTree came from a factory on our platform, we also keep a calendar of shutdowns like Chinese New Year, and when one falls inside the wait, the order-by date moves earlier. Items from outside suppliers, or ones with no orders received yet, don't get that adjustment, so add the closure to your own timing.

It learns seasons too, with a catch. Once an item has 120 days of usage history, the forecast builds a month-by-month profile from roughly the past year and scales the current month's rate by it, so if last April ran hot, this April's rate goes up. But the profile applies to the month you're in. When the 4/20 order goes out around New Year, the forecast is still planning on that month's rate, not April's. And an item in its first spring on the platform has no April to learn from.

An admin on your account can set a manual daily rate on the item's forecast page. It's set per location, and it replaces the learned rate, seasonal adjustment included, so use a number with the bump already in it. It has no start or end date, though. It applies from the day you save it until someone presses Back to automatic, so if you set it around New Year to size the 4/20 order, expect the run-out dates to look early and the suggested quantities to look high until you switch it back. The other way is to type in a reorder point and reorder quantity that cover the extra, and clear them after the season. Either way, note when you changed it so someone remembers to change it back.

A rough timeline

For an overseas part with an 8-week total wait and packing starting in early April:

• December: count, pull last year's usage for those weeks, and get quotes.
• Late December or the first days of January, depending on when Chinese New Year falls and how long your factory closes: place the order.
• Early March: count again. If anything is running ahead of plan, the extra has to come from somewhere fast, like a domestic supplier or stock that's already on a shelf, because another overseas order won't land until May.

Buying ahead for the season? Check where the price breaks fall first (reading a volume price table).